Bike, snow, ACF 50, Ace Cafe

I had planned to meet up with a few folk tomorrow to ride to the Ace Cafe where they are holding an “Adventure Day” with speakers like Austin Vince of “Mondo Enduro” fame. The freezing weather and snow are putting this in some doubt. My road hasn’t been salted and after a fresh fall of snow last night (not too much thankfully) and temperature below zero, it has been looking unlikely that I will be able to get my bike safely out of my road to the roads where salt has been spread. I had a trial ride through the snow and slush that has started to form this afternoon as some sunshine raised temperature above freezing and it wasn’t too bad but temperatures tonight are forecast to go as low as -10 degrees in places which could render my trial meaningless.

Just in case I sprayed exposed bits of the bike with ACF - 50 to ward off the salt I will encounter tomorrow if I do go out on the bike. It would have been better had the bike been really clean before I started but I sprayed over the dirty bits! I had to shake the cold tin a lot before it would spray properly and even then, it wouldn’t spray through its little tube. Still, I think I kept it off the brakes at least. The last time I used it, I got some on the brakes and hard a hard time getting rid of it and it made the brakes practically useless!

I shall see how things look in the morning and make up my mind then.

Service, Neck Brace and stuff.

I took the Goldwing to Doble's yesterday. Traffic was absolutely solid all the way there and back. How glad I am not to have to fight that sort of thing every day! It gave me a good chance however to compare the filtering abilities of the Wing and the little Honda 600 courtesy bike I used to get back and forth. Whilst the smaller bike can certainly go through smaller gaps I found that I preferred the Wing for its road presence, lights and low down grunt. I seemed to have to rev the nuts of the little bike (its redline is at 11,000 rpm and below 4000 it really does nothing) to accelerate smartly and felt very vulnerable facing oncoming traffic whilst I scooted down the middle of the road. On the Wing, it was plain that the oncoming traffic could see me and moved more to its side of the road - which was not the case when I was on the smaller bike. The service cost me £275. The technician noted that my rear tyre was getting squared-off. Inevitable I suppose given the proportion of motorway miles I have done since the tyre was replaced (a mere 4000 miles ago) but it underscores the fact that tyres don't last long on this big heavy bike.

The postman brought me a belated Xmas pressie - well actually something I ordered only a couple of days ago, namely a Leatt neck Brace. I have been watching the Dakar rally on the TV and every rider is wearing a neck brace. It gave me pause for thought and I ran through memories of times I have been pitched off riding off-road. There were certainly a few when my neck was jarred and I decided that a neck brace was probably a good thing. I haven't use it yet and am still in the process of fitting the thing. I expect it will feel constaining and uncomfortable at first - I just hope it's like seat belts in cars. When they first became mandatory, I hated the feel of them but nowadays feel quite naked without one. It was expensive at £260 but I got a £215 discount (down from £475 ) from Dirtbikebitz so I feel that it is probably good value - it certainly wll be if it saves me from serious injury although I surely hope it won't need to!

12,000 mile service

I'm looking at the weather forecasts with a somewhat nervous eye at the moment. I have booked a 12,000 mile service for the Goldwing at Doble's on Wednesday and there is a possibility of snow that day according to a couple of the forecast sites I use. Another says nothing about snow, so as usual, "You pays your money and takes your choice". Of course, I paid no money to any of these sites, so can't really complain if their prognostications are wrong. Either way, I am not a fan of riding in snow.

Doble's unfortunately don't operate on quite that principle - a service for free - and as the 12,000 mile service is a major one for the Wing, I can expect a big bill :( However, I see from a recent flyer that they are offering 25% discount on everything apart from bikes over the coming weekend. The trouble is I don't really need anything from them at present and a 25% discount isn't enough to persuade me to buy stuff that I don't need. Although, having said that, there is quite a decent range of Honda branded clothing (Joe Rocket stuff in actuality) that includes a Goldwing jacket that would look better on the bike than the BMW Rallye 2 Pro jacket I often wear..

Wordpress, Blogger and other ways of driving yourself mad.

My blog at woodgen.com had been running a fairly long time as blog lifetimes go - since May 2007 to be precise. Along the way, I have the usual frustrations experienced by anyone running their own sites - outages, lost data recalcitrant scripts and the like. Inevitably, as I added more functionality (ie complexity), things started to go downhill. The camel's back broke under the straw of updating Wordpress to its present incarnation of version 2.7. At this point all my archived posts became inaccessible even though the mysql database appeared undamaged and intact.

Various attempts to resurrect the archives failed and I became so frustrated, I set up a new blog at Blogspot (running on the Blogger software). This worked fine except that I had to import all my old posts from the mysql database by hand which took three days! That I am still sane after this is a testament to my genes or more likely, Nurofen.

So, with one fully functional blog which is here, I felt moderately happy, except that all my comments had disappeared and as I started to look at various statistics, I realised that whereas my old blog was well spidered by Google etc. and came up as a first hit on many searches, my new one figured nowhere and reading various folks views on SEO stuff, I came the view that a blog at Blogspot was always likely to feature less prominently than one on a personal web site - other things being equal.

Anyone that publishes a blog is presumably concerned with getting read by someone and I am no exception - my deathless prose is not for me alone, so I started to look for ways of resurrecting my blog at woodgen.com. I won't bore you with all the details, blind alleys, deathtraps, pitfalls and the like - tell me if you need more info but this is what worked in the end.

1. I set up a (free) blog at wordpress.com which is here.
2. I imported my Blogger data (all the posts) to my new wordpress.com blog, using the Tools>Import option
3. I exported my data from wordpress.com using the Tools>Export option
4. I set up a new database and Wordpress site on my own hosted server
5. I imported the xml file generated in (3) above.
6. Hey Presto - I have a working blog.

Finally - because I was being driven crazy by double apostrophes appearing in my new blog - as used to happen in the old Wordpress blog - when I wanted only one. I searched and searched until I found the solution.

7. I created a file called php.ini containing just these lines

magic_quotes_runtime=off
magic_quotes_gpc=off
magic_quotes_sybase=off

8. I copied the file to every directory of my new woodgen blog ( probably only one directory is important but by this stage I was past caring.
9. I commented out these lines in wp_settings.php (my // is already shown here)

// If already slashed, strip.
//if ( get_magic_quotes_gpc() ) {
// $_GET = stripslashes_deep($_GET );
// $_POST = stripslashes_deep($_POST );
// $_COOKIE = stripslashes_deep($_COOKIE);
//}

// Escape with wpdb.
//$_GET = add_magic_quotes($_GET );
//$_POST = add_magic_quotes($_POST );
//$_COOKIE = add_magic_quotes($_COOKIE);
//$_SERVER = add_magic_quotes($_SERVER);

And now, finally, I can write let's go to Jim's place without appearing illiterate!

For the time being, I am going to be cross posting my stuff at the three sites that I now have with my blog - so determined am I not to have to go through the whole darn thing again.

Bottom line after this experience?

Blogger at Blogspot is by far the easiest blog to set up and use. It lacks some of Wordpress's bells and whistles and has fewer attractive themes to pick from although Wordpess themes are being converted for Blogger by enthusiasts. It is better integrated with other Google services than Wordpress which will be of interest to folk running ads etc although the SEO stuff actually seems to favour Wordpress on your own site.

As far as I am concerned, if only a few people read my stuff and find some value or amusement in it, I am well satisfied.

Warm Hands Arrived..

Courtesy of the postman this morning. Thanks too to Derek at Pricedright for getting them sent off so quickly. The gloves are a little large but only borderline so I shall keep them. Naturally I had to try them out and with the temperature at -2 deg C this morning, it seemed like a good day to do it. I rode only a few miles but enough to let me know that the gloves were indeed doing their job and keeping my hands nice and warm. My cold thumbs never even threatened an appearance. Probably the coolest digits were my little fingers but this was only just noticeable and nothing to complain about. Had I ridden much further, I should have been wishing for long johns, it was really quite cold although fortunately without any wind to speak of.

Glove pictures aren't too exciting, so here's a shot of the Adventure-Spec bars I installed recently

Warm Hands on Order..

Well, I hope so at least. I rang Pricedright this morning and placed an order for a pair of the Gerbings heated gloves. I enjoy the cold bright weather we are having at the moment and I stay pretty warm in my Gerbings heated jacket under my riding suit and with heated grips on both bikes, the palms of my hands are OK but the tips of my thumbs get very cold to the point of spoiling the enjoyment of being out on the bike. I can wear thicker winter gloves of course but I miss the feel of the controls with thicker gloves and this always feels a bit less safe than I would like. I am hoping the Gerbings gloves will offer the warmth and the feel I want. They are supposedly waterproof too so I am pretty hopeful they will make an ideal winter glove. I ordered the Large size based on the sizing instructions but Derek at Pricedright assures me that he will change them if they don't fit properly. I must say, I have always had very good service from them in the past so I have no worries there.

Backdating is Possible!

For Blogger posts that is. I have been able to extract my old Wordpress posts one by one and am now in the process of bringing them over here. It is a long-winded way round but as far as I can see, it's the only way to do it and I am glad that it is possible at all.

I am rather counting on Blogspot being around for a long time and for the software that powers it to be updated painlessly with no input needed from me when and if it happens. At first, maintaining my own web site was fun but it now seems just a chore and even though the Wordpress installation I had on it was not difficult to manage, it had developed some irritating quirks like substituting double apostrophes for a single character.

I gave up maintaining a gallery of photography on my own site some time ago in favour of a SmugMug hosted account and that has proved a good decision, it may not be too much longer before I find a way to offload my remaining stuff on woodwork and genealogy and can get out of the site management lark altogether.